Ceramics Interview

Transcript

1. Lee 1 Helen Lee Professor Bishop Writing II March 4, 2018 Something I Love 1 2 3 It was 2009, when 9/11 happened... Even just now thinking about it, I could… I feel choked up. Yeah, it was a very powerful experience I think for all of us in New York. The news was all like drummin’ up war [but] nobody in New York wanted war, at least nobody that was visible. So it was a very uncertain time, it was a very scary time, it was a very weird [broken] 1 <Tall cactus> by Suzy Goodelman stoneware w/ black terra sigillata exterior and black glaze interior, 29"h, at Cocobolo Design, NYC 2 <Wavy spiral flanged form> by Suzy Goodelman porcelain w/ light celadon glaze, 6.75" h, at Cocobolo Design, NYC 3 <Rectangle Ribbed lamp> by Suzy Goodelman Stoneware with rusty white terra sigillata, at Trans-luxe, NYC
2. Lee 2 reality because suddenly we were all in this weird space together. And there was all this talk about dirty bombs4, if you remember, ‘They might set off a dirty bomb in New York!’. There [were] all these threats: ‘Anthrax might spread around New York, there might be dirty bombs going off in New York’. So I just felt like, I’m just gonna spend as much time as I can in Greenwich House because, at least if they drop a bomb on us, I will go out doing art. My name is Suzy Goodelman, I’m a ceramic artist, I live and work here in New York. I work at a Greenwich House Pottery on Jones street. I teach classes there in ceramics and I’m also a staff there, and I sell my ceramic work at [a] gallery on [the] lower east side named Cocobolo design5. I was born here on East 11th Street, my parents owned like a brownstone6 building there, but we moved out to Long Island when I was about 3 years old ‘cause everybody was going to the suburbs. So my younger childhood, the childhood I remember most, was on Long Island. Then when I was 8 years old, my dad passed away and my mother went back to work, which meant she was commuting to New York. So, when I was 10 years old, we moved back to New York, back to the same building on the 11th street. I came back in time for 6th grade, [so] I went to PS417 on 11th street, and then from 7th grade through 12th grade, I went to Elisabeth Irwin 4 Dirty Bomb: a nonnuclear bomb that has been packed with radioactive material so that it will contaminate a wide area when it explodes (Collins Dictionary) 5 Cocobolo Gallery- an art gallery on the lower east side of NY which exhibits and sells mainly contemporary Ceramics Art & Design 6 Brownstone building: a townhouse covered in a type of stone called brownstone. The brownstone buildings are very common in NYC neighborhoods. 7 Public School 41; also called Greenwich Village Elementary School
3. Lee 3 High School, which is on Charlton Street. So, it’s been a very Greenwich Village- heavy life (laughs). My whole family on my mother’s side is fairly artistic… well, both sides. My mother was a dancer and then she was a fashion designer and she also liked to paint and sculpt. My grandfather, on my father’s side, was a painter. And his brother, like my grand uncle was a sculptor, so there’s a lot of artists on both sides, yeah. I wouldn’t say they influenced me in the sense of ‘oh Suzy, you should do this’. But they definitely exposed me to it from the time I was born, basically. And it was always um, you know, judged as okay. Like, I’ve met people who knew they wanted to be an artist and their family was like ‘no you should be a doctor or a lawyer or something’. In my family, being an artist was always acceptable. I guess they just had a kind of a natural acceptance and respect for it, yeah. I’ve done art pretty much all my life. Well, as a little girl, I always drew pictures and I loved to make things like, I dunno, make things out of paper, make dolls, [and] sew. My mother [and] my grandmother both knew how to sew, so they taught me. I did take a little ceramics class when I was like 5 years old, like a mommy and me class. My mother and I went and I, y’know, made hand prints in clay. I have little horse heads that I’ve made (laughs). But mostly I was drawing and painting. And then in high school, I took drawing and painting classes like fine art classes after school with this particular woman. Her name was Gladys Schwartz. Gladys was an oil painter and would teach kids in her apartment, I guess to make some extra money. I was like 15 when I started. She taught me a lot. We learned some very traditional techniques; we learned pen and ink and drawing, watercolor [and] oil painting. I thought I wanted to be an illustrator but turned out I didn’t (laughs). So yeah, I did drawing and painting and then it was through my
4. Lee 4 drawing that I got a job at a big company that manufactured women’s underwear and lingerie. It was a friend of my mother’s who worked there, so she hired me to do illustrations for them and then gave me a job in their… whatever department it was called, where they produced the catalogs. When I was in my 20s and 30s, I was a professional freelance graphic artist. I worked in advertising agencies around New York. It wasn’t really creative work but it was still making things, kind of with my hands, which I liked. And then around 1999, I took my very first [ceramics] class as an adult. And then in 2000, I went to Greenwich House, which is a really wonderful place. Greenwich House is so much a part of the neighborhood [that] I’d always known about it. Kids that I was in like 6th grade with had taken classes there, so… I just always knew about it, but I had never really had a reason to go there. But after taking this little class, I really liked it and I wanted to learn more, so it was like ‘okay I think I need to go there’. It’s just… it wasn’t really my decision, [it] was more… something was telling me ‘It’s time. You go there’. So, I started taking classes there in 2000. [I took classes] between 2000 and 2009 but I used to do work exchanges8 [at the same time]. My job as work exchange was more, sort of get your hands dirty like loading and unloading kilns and mixing glazes. The classes there, they’re adult education classes, so they don’t teach you a lot about the behind-the-scenes; they don’t teach you about loading and unloading kilns and making glazes. All that is done for the students. So, I was learning [a] whole other side of ceramics, which I liked. Then in 2009, I took a job there, on staff. The job that I do on staff is a much more administrative job. I forget when I started teaching. It’s about six years that I’ve been teaching. 8 Work exchange: A program that used to be open to people taking classes at the studio. People who did work exchange got reduced tuition instead of getting paid.
5. Lee 5 -Sounds like you were more exposed to painting than ceramics. What made you choose ceramics? Well, I never felt really good painting and drawing, it always was a bit of a struggle and had anxiety attached to it for me, it never flowed… I always knew I was good, but I didn’t love… it just never flowed doing it for me. Which is why professionally I think I did not become an illustrator but instead did mechanicals, which was more, less creative and more just making things. But there was a time in my life, um, when my mother had passed away, I had inherited some money when she died. The jobs that I was doing had gotten increasingly bad for various reasons, but the freelance jobs were longer hours and they were demanding more of you and it was less and less pleasant to do it and it’s kind of a long story, but to make it short, I just didn’t want to do that anymore. And because I had inherited some money, I had the luxury [to] say no to the jobs that were really crappy. So um, and I took some time. And I felt like it was a very much a turning point for me. And I felt like I’m so tired of doing what I feel like I’m supposed to do and doing what’s expected of me, and now I have some money. There was um, there was a saying around, I don’t know if it’s as popular now but ‘Do what you love and money will follow’. I don’t know if that’s like totally true (laughs) but I felt like I need to find something I love. And remember sitting in my house thinking ‘I would rather sit here and do nothing… for as long as it takes than do one more thing because it’s expected of me’ ‘cause like spiritually, I dunno, emotionally I couldn’t do it anymore. And it took a long time. And then, and in that period, I took cooking classes. That was sort of my creative, I took cooking classes and I cooked things. And then one day… there was a little sign on Greenwich Avenue advertising, the place isn’t there anymore but, Handbuilding classes. Which is ceramics, but without a wheel. Just, Handbuilding. And that was the little class that I took [and] that was 1999. And I took that class
6. Lee 6 and I really liked it. I took it again and then I knew they can’t teach me anymore. It was such a tiny little place with such limited resources, I was just repeating, and that’s when I thought ‘okay now it’s time to go to Greenwich House’. And I went there and it’s sort of like the rest is history, I was good at it right away. There was a flow. It was, it’s not that it’s not hard work, but the creative part for me was easy… I had great beginner’s luck, things came out really good like right away and um, it was just a fit. So in a lot of ways, I feel like I was guided… to it. I feel like life really… I feel like the whole experience of ‘I’m not doing anything else than I’m expected to do, I’ll sit here for as long as it takes’ and then… over time finding that little class and then having that take me to Greenwich House was like a series of steps that was not something I figured out. It was something that I was following my own inner truth. Like, my own inner guidance and those things happened and so… it just felt really fortuitous and guided. Doing ceramics was the first time I would wake up in the morning and like, ‘I gotta get back there and keep working on whatever it was I was working on’. The first time I really had that excitement and motivation for something. So that was pretty great. Greenwich House offers open studio times, so you can go in more than just during your class. Like, you go for your class but then you can go in during open studio hours and there’s no teacher, but you can just use the studio. And it was after 9.11 that I really started going in there because it was the only place I felt okay. Greenwich House, it’s a pretty left-wing community, so philosophically, I was at home with the people. I didn’t have to argue politics with anybody. And I was at least doing something that made sense in this crazy… world that it was. Yeah. So that, in a weird way, helped me invest more into it.
7. Lee 7 -Do you only teach at Greenwich House? I did teach another place once. I mean, for like a year. The first class that I taught was at this other studio in New York called La Mano Pottery, which is in Chelsea. There’s like a group of women who own La Mano pottery. One of them came to Greenwich House [and] we were in class together. She saw what I was doing, and she invited me to teach [at La Mano]. I liked helping people learn how to do it. I didn’t love that studio, I didn’t like their clay as much or their glazes as much. But I found that I was good at communicating. Like, sort of breaking down what I was doing and telling them so that they could then do the same thing. It wasn’t just watch me and do what I’m doing, but I’m good at, you know, the specific things so that people can follow the instructions. And then it was wonderful to see what people made that I had some small part in helping to make. And then later I went to the people of Greenwich House and told them I would like to teach if there was an opportunity. -Did you face any special experience as a woman working in this field? I think these days, it’s… women are treated pretty equally as men. It didn’t used to be that way, like back in the 60s, it was a complete men’s world. If you think of the famous ceramic artists from the 60s, it’s all men. There’s some women, but the ones that everybody, like that is most well-known are the men. But I’ve heard stories about, from the women, how hard it was then. I don’t think, I’ve never encountered any inequality. I don’t know. I’m not really out in the world trying to be a well-known artist, so there might still be masculine and feminine male/ female politics out there. I remember I know a woman whose husband was a very famous painter and [she] would talk sometimes about the politics of the art world. So, I don’t know. I’m not really connected to the ceramics art world. But I know that I can, like there’s people at
8. Lee 8 Greenwich House, who have, who are professional artist who has some measure of success and… they’re all women. So… from where I sit, I think the opportunities for women are very good in ceramics. -Where and How do you get inspirations for your works? I’m a spiritual person. They don’t come from a mental process; they come more from a feeling process. In those great creative moments when there’s really a flow, I feel like it’s more something coming through me, which I consider to be… the divine or… something bigger than me, whatever you wanna call it. But some spiritual force, so I feel more like it’s something coming through me than it’s coming from me. I definitely play a part; It’s my hands that make it. But I feel like it’s more than me. My mindset about life in general is that we’re spiritual beings. Like, there’s that saying somewhere, ‘You are a spiritual being having a human experience’. That’s how I see life. Like there’s much more than just this three-dimensional life. But it’s also a process over time. Like the things you see when you look at my website, you don’t see the hundred things I made before that. A lot of it, I just got to those forms through… you know, I made a piece and I liked it and then what would happen if I made it like this? So, I work in series and its ended up into forms that I really like. But the other piece of it is I love nature. I think you can see a lot of nature reference in my forms. I love organic forms, nature forms, things that look like they’ve been underground and dug up, that have been like, exposed to the forces of nature. I guess I would say nature is my biggest inspiration, but it’s not really a 1+1=2 kind of experience. It’s more a, ‘Aah I love leaves and seashells and sand and sky…’ and that has a certain feeling and when I make this form, it has the same feeling for me. So a lot of it is… like that.
9. Lee 9 For me, beauty is a really powerful thing. It took me a long time to sort of accept that because I used to think ‘Oh beauty, that’s such a superficial value’ but I’ve come to believe that beauty is not superficial at all. Like, things that we see that are beautiful, we respond to them in a particular way. When I see something beautiful, my whole, like I can feel it all through my body; it’s like a harmony that I feel. So, that’s an ideal of mine and I love the idea that I might be able to make something that carries that kind of feeling and then is in somebody’s home. Maybe they will look at it and feel uplifted or peaceful or happy or something like that. I feel like, in my tiny little way it makes the world a better place somehow. Like, it brings harmony into the world, rather than discord or upset. When I’m making them and everything is going well, I feel connected to something beautiful. -I read some articles on how interest in pottery is increasing greatly. Mmm hmm, so true. You see it at Greenwich House. When I first started [going to Greenwich House], their classes didn’t fill, there were classes that got cancelled ‘cause there weren’t enough people in them. Now, we have more students than ever. Every single class fills, there’s not enough space at all. So you really can see how so many people wanna come do it. And in the art world too. It’s becoming a much more respectable medium. I think it’s great. It’s great for me ‘cause people buy ceramics. Like, I got in at the right time (laughs). As for as Greenwich House is concerned, it’s really crowded. I mean, there’re people that get turned away from classes, like, regularly now. That never happened. People can’t get in. Old-time students at Greenwich House, they’re learning little by little but a lot of them would get shut out because they used to be able to wait till the last minute to register and they would wait till the last minute and everything is full.
10. Lee 10 -Why do you think this is happening? I would like to think, one reason is, we’ve gotten more and more into computers and devices and screens that people like something handmade. But, so I like to think people are… finding pleasure in handmade things and making things with their hands, whether they think that or not, ‘cause I think that would be a very healthy trend. I have seen people at Greenwich House tell me that this is like their therapy. They work all day in some corporate environment on computers and screens and devices. And they can come here and just, it’s right brained. I think our world has gotten so left-brained, that I would like to, sometimes I think this is the human, humans balancing themselves by going for something right-brained. -What do you think the ceramics field would look like in about 20 years and where would you like to see it in 20 years? I very well may not be here in 20 years… I can’t hold that much, no. I don’t have a preference [for the ceramics field]. I hope that human race is in good shape in 20 years. I hope people have learned to get along and live in peace. In which case, ceramics will be doing very well in 20 years. But for me personally, as far as like what would I like to see or not see in 20 years, it’s more along the lines of really, I hope, I hope in 20 years, everybody is fed and clothes and has a job and… there’s no more war. And the, and you know, there’s no more raping of the environment. So, I know that’s not about ceramics but that’s my own… that’s what I care about most in that timeframe.